With fans eagerly awaiting Thomas Pynchon's first novel in over a decade, the noir caper Shadow Ticket, a new ranking assesses the reclusive author's fiction from the past 60 years. The list runs from weakest to strongest, placing Pynchon's early short stories at the bottom, described as 'for aficionados only' due to their failure even by the author's own admission.
Next come Against the Day, criticised as 'plotless, prolix and gargantuan', and Bleeding Edge, a lightweight novel whose puns and red herrings fail to cohere. Vineland is noted for its prescient themes of surveillance and media saturation, but Pynchon's aim is off.
Higher up, V. displays a rare sincerity and affection for characters, while The Crying of Lot 49 is praised as 'short, funny' and the literary equivalent of non-Euclidean geometry. Topping the list is Inherent Vice, a wilfully weird private eye tale adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by Paul Thomas Anderson.
